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Are you utilizing content creation tools and other resources to enhance your content Marketing Strategy? A few months ago, we shared with you What You Need to Know About Content Marketing. And shortly there after we followed that up with An 8-step Content Strategy that Works. Now it’s time to take it a step further and share some of the content creation tools and resources to help you hit the ground running with your content creation strategy....
Online merchants could always use some free expert advice from the design community. There is a wide variety of free ebooks available to help. Here is a list of helpful ebooks on design. There are titles on typography, classic design, color theory, user-experience design, logos, brand building, creativity, and more. All of these ebooks are free.
Talking to people and potential customers is useful for learning but not validating. To validate your idea you need really need both acquisition and activation data. These are the first two metrics that matter when determining whether you have a product or business. Acquiring users through advertising channels and activating or converting them shows real validation. Because building a landing page requires less effort than starting a business or building a product, this can be an easier way to validate or invalidate an idea. By using learnings from customer interviews and basic market research one can look at setting up a landing page for further validating or invalidating your idea....
Nielsen released its first batch of viewership data about Netflix. The never-before-publicly-shared data shows that the first episode of Stranger Things 2 drew a bigger audience than the Season 8 premiere of The Walking Dead, cable TV’s most-watched show a week earlier. According to Nielsen’s SVOD Content Ratings, 15.8 million U.S. viewers watched the first episode of Stranger Things 2 over the first three days, including a whopping 11 million people in the 18-49 demo. That puts it just above the live-plus-3 numbers for The Walking Dead Season 8 premiere on Oct. 22, which drew 15 million total viewers and 8.8 million in the demo....
There's a reason companies test the colors of things like advertisements, banner ads, and call-to-action (CTA) buttons. When we did a button color test here at HubSpot, for example, we found that a red CTA button outperformed a green CTA button by 21%. In other words, we increased conversion rate without changing anything about the page except for the color of the CTA. That's the power of color psychology in marketing. Let's explore the ways color psychology plays a role in marketing, with a quick vocabulary lesson and a visual guide...
Did you know that LinkedIn now has over 500 million users? That’s close to a fourth of Facebook’s user base, but with double the power. Being the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn can connect you to people who fall within a wide range of job titles, which could be anything from student intern to C-suite executive.
Used right, LinkedIn could connect you to partners, prospects or clients and serve as a great alternative to traditional offline networking. But to expand your capacity and build many great relationships, you need the assistance of LinkedIn marketing tools that can streamline and amplify your efforts.
The following is a list of seven LinkedIn marketing tools that can help you publish effective content, and initiate and manage important relationships.
An amazing 91 percent of respondents said they were using content marketing, which means almost everyone now is doing content marketing in some way, shape, or form. While this number has grown steadily over the years, this year’s response saw a huge jump—18 percent, to be exact—from the 2017 B2B Content Marketing survey. As Lisa Murton Beets and Ann Handley, the report’s coauthors, reveal in their introduction, this huge leap now shows that “content marketing is no longer the shiny new object.” Instead, it’s now officially a fully established practice that is widely recognized and adopted.
Lowlight: Most Content Marketers Are Still Flying Solo 53 percent of respondents said that their entire organization’s content marketing efforts rest solely on a small or one-person team. While it’s nice to be seen as the content marketing superhero (or superheroes) of the organization, small or one-person teams can also lead to overworked employees that lack the resources and budget to really plan, execute, and measure efforts properly. It can also lead to higher outsourcing expenses. Just ask the 56 percent of respondents who said they outsource at least one content marketing activity, which is most likely to be content creation and content promotion.
Highlight: Content Quality Wins Over Quantity 70 percent of respondents said they always or frequently prioritize delivering content quality over content quantity. In addition, 72 percent said they always or frequently consider how content will impact the overall experience a person has with their organization. For far too long, the industry has been chanting, “Don’t create content for the sake of creating content,” and it looks like everyone is finally on board with that mantra.
Sometimes it feels like the 1970s in the New York Times and Washington Post newsrooms: reporters battling each other to break news about scandals that threaten to envelop the White House and the presidency of Donald Trump. Only now their scoops come not in the morning edition but in a tweet or iPhone alert near the end of the day. It is like old times in another way: both newspapers are getting readers to pay, offsetting advertising revenue relinquished to the internet. After years of giving away scoops for nothing online, and cutting staff, the Times and Post are focusing on subscriptions—mostly digital ones—which now rake in more money than ads do.
Their experiences offer lessons for the industry in America, although only a handful of newspapers have a chance at matching their success. A subscription-first approach relies on tapping a national and international market of hundreds of millions of educated English-language readers and converting a fraction of those into paying customers. With enough digital subscribers—Mark Thompson, chief executive of the New York Times, believes his newspaper can get to 10m, from 2m today—the subscriptions-first model could (in theory) generate more profits than business models dependent on print advertising used to.
There are so many different sets of data and information, but no steps on how to improve upon your current analytical data. And you need to fix your site if you want to continue to bring in new sales and revenue. Optimization must be at the forefront of your strategy. I’ve personally used Google’s Search Console to fix my site countless times. It provides data that you can’t find in Google Analytics. But the key is to know how to use that data to your advantage. Today I’ll share a few insider insights on how to use the Search Console to fix your site and drive conversions....
Most startups are forced to fight for their piece of the attention pie, and you are probably no different. But even with a limited budget, time, and resources, you can still make use of content marketing and achieve great results. Afterall, 70% of your customers would rather learn about your business through an article as opposed to an advertisement. It really is a no-brainer. You just have to know how...
In a prior post, I wrote about four tools to make you a content curating master. It’s easy to make mistakes in this process, and if you make some of these mistakes, you risk the loss of attention, followers, respect, and authority. But not to worry! I’ll provide suggestions on how to correct the mistakes. In this post, I cover common mistakes people make in content curation and how to solve them. 1) Frequency Mistake: You Share Too Often On Twitter, there’s a school of thought that people may miss your first tweet, so you should repeat the tweet multiple times. While I agree with this, a common mistake is to disregard spacing and variety. On spacing, it would be a mistake to post the same tweet five times, one hour apart. On variety, it would be a mistake to post those five tweets without other tweets mixed in. Think about your followers. If you’re one of 5,000 people a user is following, then your tweets will be evenly distributed across the other 4,999 users....
The first thing you need to know is that you should be posting daily, ideally two to three times a day and when you’re posting, you need to spread it out. Second, spread out your posts and when you’re spreading them out, try to spread them out by at least two hours in between each post. By doing that you’re gonna get more engagement per post. Third, test out different post types....
As President Donald Trump wages daily war against the press, millennials are subscribing to legacy news publications in record numbers—and at a growth rate, data suggests, far outpacing any other age group.
Since November's election, the New Yorker, for instance, has seen its number of new millennial subscribers more than double from over the same period a year earlier. According to the magazine's figures, it has 106 percent more new subscribers in the 18-34 age range and 129 percent more from 25-34.
The Atlantic has a similar story: since the election, its number of new subscribers aged 18-24 jumped 130 percent for print and digital subscriptions combined over the same period a year earlier, while 18-44 went up 70 percent.
Newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times typically do not share specific subscriber data, but according to a Post spokesperson, its subscriber growth rate is highest among millennials. A New York Times representative relayed that the paper was “seeing similar trends” in subscriptions and pointed to public data on digital traffic that showed its online reach among millennials to be up 9 percent from the same period a year ago.
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Think of curated content the way you do a Works Cited section of a term paper. You use it to add relevance and to reinforce your argument. In marketing terms, that argument is that you are aware of the types of content that appeal to your audience. Responsible selection of curated content shows that you understand your audience. And when people believe that you understand them, it goes a long way toward building trust. A key difference, however, between content curation and a Works Cited section is that, quite often, the curated content comprises a significant slice of the content presented. In many cases, the content is presented with a short, original commentary. How well does that work? Well, look at the Huffington Post. They have practically elevated the concept of content curation to an art form. And they have discovered the fine balance between curation and branding. You’d barely know that they get a vast amount of their content from outside sources. It’s because they go to a tremendous effort to present the content in a way in which it practically becomes their own....
This month the focus is on design elements. Many recent trends have involved user patterns, color or typography, but here it’s all about subtle techniques. Essential trends to take note of include downpage navigation, boxes as a design element and plenty of vertical lines and movement.
Up until recently, you also needed to have someone in your team who knows their way around technology for creating and editing videos. Luckily, there is now a plethora of video tools that make the process painless and surprisingly affordable. Lumen5 is one of those tools. Now let’s see what this video creation platform is all about. How it Works Lumen5 is a perfect tool for marketers and business owners who blog. Why? Because it helps them easily turn blog posts into videos they can share on social media. After a quick signup, you’ll be able to use Lumen5 for free to create short and shareable videos from any link.
It turns out longer is better—at least when it comes to writing headlines for branded content. Branded content technology provider Polar analyzed a bunch of data provided by premium publishers, such as Oath and Gannett, to see how variation in headlines affected key performance indicators (KPIs). It found that branded content headlines between 90 and 99 characters achieved a clickthrough rate (CTR) of 0.43%, higher than headlines with fewer characters. The “more is better” theory also held true for the number of words included in a headline. Polar reported that headlines with 16 words garnered a CTR of 0.33%. By comparison, pithy headlines of just four words recorded an average CTR of less than half that, at just 0.14%. Some other tips Polar gleaned from its work? Numbers and special characters also resulted in a bump in CTRs. So feel free to figure out how to squeeze an ampersand in there....
As reported by Fast Company and Inc. Magazine, a new EyeQuant study has shown that there's a surprisingly strong relationship between the "visual clarity" of a website (as rated by an algorithm) and its bounce rate. In fact, the results suggest that up to one-third of a user's decision to stay or bounce comes down to a snap judgment of whether or not the page is too cluttered. In this post, we'll take a closer look at the data and the methodology behind the study.
Why study the impact of visual clarity?
Within the design community, there's been a definite trend towards simpler, more stripped-back design. At EyeQuant, we've seen many of our customers "de-clutter" their way to higher conversion rates, and even observed that amongst a collection of online retailers, the ones with "cleaner" design were growing the fastest.
What we wanted to understand is this: does "clean" design have a positive impact on user engagement across the board, or is it limited to specific cases like overly cluttered-sites or retail?
Just as traditional publishing advanced decades ago, digital marketing is following the same trajectory today. The only difference is the rate at which things are changing, and the fact that many digital brands forget to be human.
It doesn’t matter if you’re writing on stone or using augmented reality to get your message across: It must be interesting and relevant to motivate a reaction from the end-user.
Creating and distributing compelling content through social media is especially important from a branding perspective. The trick to the future of social media content marketing is using modern approaches at being human.
Here are five social media content marketing trends to watch heading into 2018...
What is a social media marketing plan? And what steps do you need to create it? Read more here for the complete guidelines.
Via massimo facchinetti
Find best practices and ideas for using Facebook cover videos on your Facebook business page.
Marketers have discovered that they need to approach the consumer differently. We can’t serve up the same old ads anymore and expect results similar to 30 or 40 years ago. Instead, we must add value to consumers’ lives to make them want to give us the time of day. Hence, the fundamentals behind content marketing – relationship-building, focusing on the customer versus the brand – were born in response. This approach – oh boy, does it work. For some excellent proof, let these nine statistics do the rest of the talking. They really do speak for themselves. Prepare to persuade....
It’s no secret that copy editing jobs are changing. But how well have college editing courses kept up? Newspapers are dismantling copy editing desks or realigning the way copy editors function. And newsroom cutbacks have hit copy editors particularly hard. The number of copy editing, layout or online producer jobs dipped 35 percent between 2000 and 2015, according to the American Society of News Editors’ annual newsroom survey. Yet ACES: The Society for Editing is seeing record growth in its membership, which now tops 1,900. This suggests that editors are still working, but are using traditional editing skills on new platforms and in new venues. "The survey also identified gaps between what professionals said are important skills and what academics are teaching. Among the biggest: curation, editing for the web and analytics."...
According to a recent study comprised of marketers from a variety of industries, 94% said influencer marketing was an effective campaign strategy. That's great news for marketers -- right? Not so fast. Even though a majority of marketers believe influencer marketing is a viable tactic, it's still incredibly challenging to report accurately on influencer campaign ROI. In fact, 78% of marketers said that determining the success of influencer marketing campaigns would be a top challenge this year....
According to TOPO, prospects open less than 24% of sales emails. That means three out of four emails you’ve agonized over and sent to buyers in the past month were likely not worth writing at all. A study from Boomerang reveals the factors behind why some emails are opened, and others are sent straight to trash. The data, based on a collection of more than 40 million emails, showed messages that expressed either moderate positivity or negativity evoked 10 to 15% more responses than completely neutral emails. But, reps should know, the research discovered too much emotion in messages resulted in similar response rates as neutral emails. “Flattery works, but excessive flattery doesn't,” Alex Moore wrote in the report. The optimal length of an email has been much debated. But according to Boomerang’s data, emails between 50 and 125 words had the best response rates at just above 50%. Short and direct emails resonated best with prospects and earned a response. However, the numbers revealed a fine line: Emails that were 10 words or shorter got a response just 36% of the time....
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Useful content creation tools and resources to amp up your marketing strategy from George Gill.
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